To date, the practice has been that the user selects a shooting scene, such as a portrait or landscape, with a camera or printer driver, and image adjustment appropriate to the particular image is performed according to the scene selection (see, for example, JP11-136219A, JP2001-169135A, and JP2001-298631A).
However, with the prior art techniques, selection of a shooting scene such as a portrait or landscape requires the user to perform a fairly complicated operation during shooting or during printing.
For example, where shooting scene is selected with a camera, where a portrait image and a landscape image are shot in series, it becomes necessary to reset the scene each time an image is taken. Where shooting scene is selected with a printer driver, it becomes necessary to select the shooting scene for each image, which involves a complicated operation in cases where portrait images and landscape images are intermixed.
In view of the problems mentioned above, it is an object of the invention to automatically carry out image quality adjustments appropriate for individual image data.